Where: Rock It Room
http://www.rock-it-room.com/

406 Clement St.
San Francisco, CA 94118

When: Wednesday, May 14th 7:30pm

Cover: $5

Streaming url: http://66.186.45.114:8022

Blue Fusion Lake House slurl: SLURL

I hope you'll join me in Real Life in San Francisco, and in Second Life or via webstream from anywhere in the world, as I perform at 9pm SLT/PST time on May 14, 2008.

I'm just a little part of a huge Second Life showcase featuring SL star Keiko Takamura and 5 other artists -- but I get a full half hour set.

Here's a link to my music, if you're unfamiliar with my recent stuff: http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/my_music_live_video/

The complete line up (all times are SLT/PST):

7:30 - BabbleGrabble Swindlehurst http://babblegrabble.com

8:00 - Pato Milo http://www.myspace.com/patomilo

8:30 - Jacopo de Nicola http://www.myspace.com/jacopodenicola

9:00 - Haley Bailey (aka Lisa Rein) http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/my_music_live_video/

9:30 - Melanie Keller http://www.myspace.com/melaniekeller

10:00 - Keiko Takamura featuring ZeroOne Paz on percussion http://www.myspace.com/keikotakamura

They have free Wifi at Rocket Room too, so, even if you have to work, you can bring your laptops and geek out at the show!

Hope to see you there!

Who: JueL Resistance

When: Sunday, April 13, 2008 - 7pm

Where: Wishfest 1.0 - Solaris II - Second Life

As one of the first indie musicians to join and perform in Second Life, she has built a strong presence in the virtual world. A world where she is also known for her visual art work; her paintings, drawings and photography are displayed in various galleries throughout Second Life.

JueL also owns and performs at the infamous "Living Room #13" where she has headlined and hosted Naked Acoustic Sessions for almost 2 years, bringing in only the finest seasoned and raw musicians of SL.

JueL is currently working on her latest CD while preparing for her 2nd adventure to Mahoneyfest in Georgia. Her latest work in progress is a compilation of both recent and past experiences blended soulfully into a deep groove of blues, americana, folk and "unplugged acoustics".

We're very excited that JueL will be coming by to play Wishfest Sunday night!

Nick Noir will be going on right after her, at 8pm.

See you there!

Come play at Wishfest 1.0 !

Last night's Wishfest 1.0 show started off our festival with a big bang. About 24 people showed up -- that's actually a lot for an SL event! As you can see from the movies, it was really hoppin!

Here's my favorite of Cylindrian's songs, "Sweet Alice."

I've made it available both as a big 54 MB and a smaller 20 MB file.

I've also made an audio file available as an MP3 (6 MB) and a higher fidelity wav file.

There's also a lengthier movie (19 MB) of the same song that includes some pre-song conversation with the crowd, and clip of another song (64 MB), that I'm sure Cylindrian will soon tell me the rightful name of :)

Here's another of my favorite's from the Feather's Boa installation. Bryn Oh and Georg Janick, two other Node Zero Gallery artists, will also be setting up some of their incredible creations soon.

The next acts that I know about at this time (because, of course, it is a Flash Festival - and if things are successful, there should be people on stage springint up at any time), is

Sunday night, April 13, at 7pm SLT,

when JueL Resistance (More on her in a bit...) will be doing a set, and Nick Noir is coming on right after her at 8pm.

You should go on next! Drop me a line: Haley Bailey in-world or lisa@wishfarmers.com so I can add you to the roster and the "Wishfest Performers" group.

Anyone can join the "Wishfest 1.0" group to be notified when people are going on.

Last night's show with Cylindrian Rutabega provided an awesome launch for Wishfest 1.0 (link is a SLURL to Solaris II).

It would be great for you to go there and check out the space to truly appreciate it. And I, of course, want you to appreciate it, so you'll set up a space there, or perform there in some capacity.

Cylindrian brought up spoken word poetry last night, and reminded me that I hadn't really made it clear that Poets are welcome too :-)

Last night's show with Cylindrian Rutabega provided an awesome launch for Wishfest 1.0 (link is a SLURL to Solaris II).

It would be great for you to go there and check out the space to truly appreciate it. And I, of course, want you to appreciate it, so you'll set up a space there, or perform there in some capacity.

Cylindrian brought up spoken word poetry last night, and reminded me that I hadn't really made it clear that Poets are welcome too :-)

I just had a great phone conversation with Cylindrian Rutabega, who is playing at Wishfest tonight at 7pm.

She's been hanging out on Solaris II for two days, just wandering around and enjoying the SIM.

The beauty is that Solaris II is none other than the latest work of artist Somatika Xiao (a.k.a. David Stumbaugh). Somatika is the artist who collaborated with Spot Draves on the Sheep Vortex exhibit at Node Zero Gallery last month. So here's how it started. Wishfarmer Gary Bukowski, Somatika, and I came up with the idea a couple weekends ago of something called a "Flash Festival." Similar to the Flash Mobs of Real Life, combined with the old school charm of a Full Moon Rave.

For those of you who don't remember such events of lore, Full Moon Raves were wonderful free dance/art/music festivals that happened in the early 90's, where you went to the first location just to pick up a map to the second location, which was usually on the beach or in a park somewhere, all tucked away, and usually on private land with the owner's blessing, where you were generally safe and sound.

These events were free, equipped with lots of water and oranges and things, and often came with a free pancake breakfast in the morning, often while you and everyone watched the sun come up together.

We're trying to capture a little of that magic, while also expanding upon it a bit to include dancers, artists, and performers of all kinds. The sky's the limit, if you have a live act, or even a finished work, that you'd like to stream to a large number of people from all over the world.

So again, a "Flash Festival" is kind of ad hoc DIY combination of music, dance, film and art festivals all rolled up into one -- and for as long as it lasts!

We've also decided to let the artists run wild, where the question we're trying to answer is: "What if we made a big art installation, with a main floor, three stages, and also an underground cavernous area (The Rabbit Hole), where anyone could stake out a little area and set up a display. (I hope it goes without saying that object spam will be removed :)

Node Zero Gallery artist Feathers Boa has already set up an little installation in the Rabbit Hole. Your art installation could be next :-)

Feathers Boa's Art Installation on Solaris II (in the Rabbit Hole)

Then what if we took it a step further, and set up each stage with its own media url, and each with its own set of video screens, and wrote some code to enable anyone that belonged to our "Wishfest Performers" group to jump on stage, load in their stream, and just start playing.

If all your friends sign up for the "Wishfest 1.0" group - you can send a notice to them to let them know you're onstage and playing (or in advance to let them know when you will be going on.

Yes film makers, djs, and video artists, you can invite some friends and load in your pre-existing video/media streams, if you wish. It will work fine! Have a party - Throw a Rave! This island should be able to hold a lot of people. We made it sturdy with lots of Wishfarmer love.

So teleport to Wishfest on Solaris II and decide for yourself how your art/music/films/dance/performanceart/dj mixes etc. etc. etc. can work into the linearly twisted beauty of this SIM, courtesy of Somatika Xiao.

If anyone has any questions, or tech issues, comments or ANYTHING - IM Haley Bailey in world or email Haley Bailey/Lisa Rein at lisa@wishfarmers.com.

On April 1, 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet had a congressional hearing on virtual worlds.

The official title of the hearing was "Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars (link goes to official witness list).

Video of entire hearing (300+ MB)

Witnesses:

1. Philip Rosedale, Founder/Chairman of the Board/Former CEO, Linden Labs

2. Susan Tenby, Senior Manager, Community Development, TechSoup

3. Colin J. Parris, PhD, Vice President, Digital Convergence, IBM Research/IBM Corporation

4. Larry Johnson, PhD, The New Media Consortium

Philip Rosedale	This hearing was the first time I've seen any representatives from virtual worlds get a chance to actually explain themselves. I think the witnesses did a great job of making what I'm going to start calling "The case for virtual worlds." (What I believe to be an open and shut case :) Four "witnesses" presented to the Subcommittee that morning. Their names are in the table below, along with relevant stop/start times for their presentations.
If you saw the Daily Show clip on the Congressional Hearings, you may have been concerned about congress being confused about terrorists using virtual worlds. But actually, terrorism was only mentioned a couple times in freaked out passing. The real story is that Virtual Worlds are about to be as big as Social Networking (a phenomenon that congress seems well aware of and impressed by).	Susan Tenby
Colin J. Parris	Of course, we know that Virtual Worlds are going to be even bigger than Social Networking, and really already have been for some time. Although virtual worlds are viewed as an outgrowth of Social Networking, in reality, virtual worlds have existed much longer, and have an extensive and rich history behind them going back more than 20 years. I think hearings such as this one are a step in the right direction, and demonstrate that Congress is finally realizing the potential for community, art, science, and commerce in these worlds, and taking this potential quite seriously.
It's also great to see IBM stepping up to the plate to explain things in a way that even Congress can understand. (No offense congress peeps, but you guys aren't always the best at grokking technology. Series of tubes aside :) But that's the exciting part! The success of virtual worlds has become so tangible that now even IBM can explain this success effectively in business-speak. That's damned exciting! Now, hopefully, we can point to the very excellent examples of the incredible business, educational, and artistic applications going on in Second Life, and other virtual worlds right now, and use them to help explain these very tangible scenarios to the rest of the real life world.	Larry Johnson

Sidenote: The Pete was nice enough to track down this clip for me. Due to technical difficulties, I was unable to edit the file down at this time. So here's the whole thing, at over 300 MB.

I've provided very concise times for the entire hearing, so you can still find the parts you need quickly, after downloading the whole thing.

This is from the April 7, 2008 program.

More on the Congressional hearings on virtual worlds.

Video files: 17 MB -- 56 MB

Sound files: MP3 -- aiff

The Daily Show - The best news on TV.

Who: Cylindrian Rutabega

When: Thursday, April 10, 7pm SLT

Where:
Solaris II, Second Life

Wishfest 1.0 is a Flash Festival of music and arts!

Musicians, artists, DJs, dancers, poets and creative folks of all kinds will be performing on the Wishfest stages.

Think woodstock + earth day + a full moon rave -- just grab a stage and throw in your stream. All free! Just because we realized we could, and decided to experiment a little.

Join this group to be notified when acts are performing -- and for flash concerts in the future.

PERFORMERS:

If you'd like to perform, just drop me, Haley Bailey, an IM, and I'll send you an invite to be in the "Wishfest Performers" group.

Then you can jump on stage and type "/777" + the url of your stream.

You will be piped in to the sound system and are free to perform LIVE!

TO FIND OUT WHEN ACTS ARE PERFORMING:

Join the "Wishfest 1.0" group in Second Life.

The Node Zero Gallery opening on March 13th went great!

"Sheep Vortex" is an interactive art installation created by Spot and artist/SL programmer Somatika Xao.

Here's a little video I made of the night's events.

Teleport Now to Sheep Vortex

Music by Nine Inch Nails under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license that the whole album is released under!

Spot said he was "pleased and gratified by the experience."

Here's another installment from my interview with him (below).

Lisa: Now, when it sort of gets wispy for a minute, before it settles in on its next thing...

Spot: That's a "transition."

Lisa: What's going on when that happens?

Spot: Well, it's doing interpolation in this genetic space, and it uses cubic splines, so that everything stays smooth. The reason it gets maybe fuzzy or wispy is that it's kind of like noise or dissonence, kind of, in music. It's like, when everything is out of tune. It's like, highly structured geometry - like triangles and squares with sharp, straight lines - would be the equivalent of like pure tones, like sin waves, or a flute. You know, the visual equivalent of a flute sound in the metphor I'm trying to give - a line or a curve or a circle.

Lisa: So is that during the interpolation phase, because it's trying to figure out what it's doing?

Spot: Yeah because to go from one harmony to another harmony you have to go through chaos and disharmony, because you're going from one domain of organization to another domain of organization, and in between, you're disorganized. So that's the principle.

Lisa: This metaphor of virtual worlds in virtual worlds is one that comes up a lot lately. Are you saying that when somebody votes on a picture, that that information is stored somehow in this format, and then tallied up? Is that how that works? I'm trying to understand what information is expressed in the XML.

Spot: The XML controls the shapes, and the colors, and the motions. The votes don't get stored in there. The votes get transmitted to the server, and tallied up.

Lisa: The shapes -- like the way a vector-based format, like SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) works?

Spot: Nope. Are you asking about the renderer and the way the visual language works?

Lisa: Yep.

Spot: It's based on...what you're sort of seeing is the interference pattern between geometric transformations of the plane. So, you can imagine like, one map of the plane to a plane might be something like "rotation," ok. That's one transformation of a plane. Another transformation of the plane is like "scale," "rotate" and "translate," are the three basic linear ones. But there's also, non-linear transformations, like you know, you can imagine "bending" or "warping" the plane. So there are a zillion transformations of the plane.

Lisa: So that's what is expressed?

Spot: Yes. The XML is a list of transformations of the plane. And then, what the renderer does -- See, in order to actually turn the genetic code, the "genotype," into the "phenotype," you actually have to solve the equation. Just like, the only way to find out who a child is going to turn into, you have to let them grow up. It takes time, right. So, in order to draw the image, you have to do all these iterations, and so you generate billions of particles that move according to the transformations, and then the "interference"-- what you see as the particles move - the results make the pictures.

Lisa: So, particle systems are another thing that you hear a lot about in Second Life.

Spot: Right. This is like a custom particle system. One that generates so many particles, that everything you see, when you see a line here, it's not a line, it's particles that happened to have combined and ganged up to form a line. And so these particles are like intelligent dust, can reconfigure themselves into any of the shapes that you see, just by changing the rules that they're all following.

Jay and Ryanne came over to my place and interviewed Jamais a couple months ago.

Here's the end result:

DATE: TODAY - Saturday, March 22, 2008

TIME: 11am and 3pm SLT

Come see my pal Cylindrian Rutabega - along with the ChangHigh Sisters - performing LIVE.

I haven't seen the ChangHigh sisters personally yet, but for those of you, like myself, who are interested in both music artists, and the latest set design and visual performance art in the Second Life space, I hear they're pushing the envelope, and I think you'll be interested in checking out this show.

I'll be at the 3pm show, if you want to meet up there.

Cylindrian was very excited to be branching out a little from the traditional "music gig," and over into a new kind of artistic realm.

Here's a little more from the notecard from Cylindrian:

"ChangHigh Sisters will not only dance their beautiful firedances of an exotic and seductive nature, but will in the show, present the virtuals worlds first 2, 3, 6 and 7 acrobatic pyramids and will jump up in their rotating trapezes and show the harmony and elegance of an almost unseen kind ever before."

Click on the image below for a teleport.

My pal Kevvy writes a great post looking back on the protests of March 20, 2003.

Oh the good times! Being threatened by officers donned with clubs! Trampled by horses in broad daylight, and to a good soundtrack even!

This was one of the first flashmob protests too! Even we didn't know where we were going until the people that had text messaging/blackberries told us :-)

This will still always be the most frightening cilp i think. (blog entry that goes with it)
(But that's only because I never got the horse trampling footage up.)

So what's changed between now and then? Not a whole hell of a lot, except we're not in the streets anymore. What the hell's up with that? We're spending billions of dollars a day on this fucking war, and it has all played out just like we said it would - corrupt war profiteering businesspeople and politicians have openly traded blood for oil -- which was why we were protesting in the first place, but somehow, when what we said was gonna happen, happened, we got discouraged and just... I dunno... just gave up I guess. It's pretty lame.

There was a pathetic little protest in Berkeley today, and they couldn't even agree whose turn it was to speak -- I mean they were arguing about it. And I didn't know which was worse, that their protest was so pathetic, or that I had the nerve to call their protest pathetic, when I was even more pathetic for not having gone to a protest in years. (Years!)

And then Kevin sent me this link, and I realized that five years had gone by since I cared enough to stand up against this war, and then I realized that, over the last five years, since the war has actually started, I don't feel like I've done enough, not nearly enough, to try to stop this war.

Damn.

Thanks Kevin! For the Reminder! Let's rekindle
our protest tradition soon!

And please protest organizers! Let's make sure we have good DJs and musicians for the protests ok!?

I'll do my part to help out with that, I promise. Email me and I will hook you up with great talent - free of charge!! I know lots of great musicians/artists/djs that are ready to come together to make a difference!

That's why this protest was so cool, for instance...

I wanted to tell you quickly about two shows I have coming up at the Central Perk in El Cerrito, California. (SF Bay Area)

phone: (866) 417-5206 address: 10086 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, CA 94530-3927

March 26 - 7-9pm
April 25 - 8-10pm

This place is a block from El Cerrito Plaza Bart, the Central Ave Exit going either direction on Highway 80 -- or straight up/down San Pablo Avenue until you get to Central. It's huge, has great food, and get this...is also an antique collectible toy shop! (Which = pure heaven for me :)

The April 25th show will be broadcast live into Second Life too! More on all that later!

The March 26th show is very informal show --Musicians: bring your instrument and play/sing a song or two!

The April 25th is more formal but you should still show up and play!

Both shows are a great time to meet up with people and talk and geek out! The place is huge and doesn't turn up the sound to overpower you or anything -- plus March 26th will be an un-miked intimate songwriter showcase kinda thing anyway, where I think i'm gonna do all my songs all the way thru. Like all 30 of em er something...maybe...(well there's more... but prolly only 30 good ones :)

ok hope to see you there!

Cylindrian Rutabega -- "Grace" in RL - is playing the Central Perk in El Cerrito tonight (and I'll be hanging around with my guitar -- just in case :-)

She's there for three hours from 7-10 pm. She has a bunch of cool friends coming by and the Central Perk is my new favorite hang out i think. (Directions below photograph.)

This would also be a great time to come by and say hi in human form. I love my new robot and avatar friends, but it is still nice to see and hug the actual carbon-based unit corresponding to the identity of the human I love, during those rare special occasions when such meetings are possible :)

Cylindrian Rutabaga Live Tonight!


Directions: This place is really easy to get to:

- It's 1 block away from El Cerrito Plaza Bart, on the corner of Central Avenue and San Pablo.

- From Highway 80, coming North or South, it's the "Central Ave." Exit off the freeway. Then head east off the freeway for five minutes till you get to San Pablo Ave.

-From the North OR South, just take San Pablo Ave till it hits Central Ave. El Cerrito is in between Berkeley/Albany and Richmond. If you're coming north and you hit Guitar Center, you've gone too far.
Going south, hit the Pete's on the right and you've gone too far.

- Address: 10086 San Pablo, El Cerrito, 94530

-Phone: 866-417-5206

-See you tonight!

Wow this is really getting exciting. Seems like a lot of people are coming by tonight.

We were happy to see the opening mentioned in
Boing Boing and Massively this week.

So... Spot decided to have a party tonight in real life to coincide with tonight's
Second Life Art Opening.

That's right! Tonight! - Thursday, March 13 - from 6-9pm at Atlas Cafe, San Francisco.

They have good beer, wine and food there! Just come by after work.

We'll be out in the back yard. It's bluegrass night inside - we'll be outside.

Spot will be there live - with his projector in tow.

Hope to see you there!